The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 20, 1941

Arsenic and Old Lace (by Joseph Kesselring, produced by Howard Lindsay &
Russel Crouse) is absolutely top farce. A violently funny and batty
murder play, it might be described, in the words of one of the cast, as
what could be expected "if Strindberg had written Hellzapoppin."

The story concerns a family in which insanity not only runs but "fairly
gallops." Two sweet Brooklyn spinsters (Josephine Hull & Jean Adair)
have taken to putting lonely old men out of their loneliness with a
compound of elderberry wine, arsenic, strychnine and cyanide, followed
by Christian burial in the cellar. In these obsequies...